I have worked in this industry for several years and several vendors and have never heard of this vendor.

Granted, there are some decent free ones like AVG, but they lack the responsiveness of a commercial vendor.

Of the Mac vendors, I would steer you towards either McAfee or Trend, Symantec tends to be bloated and slows your system down.

[soapbox]
BTW, we've been advising Mac users for years, the sense of false security is just that, false. While there certainly hasn't been the same volume of outbreaks as the Windoze world, it's been, that's changing as the Mac becomes more popular. And, it's always been possible to 'store and forward' an Intel-based virus.
[/soapbox]

Also note that it may not be malware per se, it may also be spyware. There are definitely distinct difference 'tween the two, and you may also need to investigate a good anti-spyware program. Not sure if Webroot runs on Mac, but it's very good.

(note that I haven't plugged any of my own company's products here :biggrin: and no, we don't write viruses to further our cause :biggrin

In addition to AV, I also put a good firewall on my son's Macbook that he got for college....

I'm considering it might be spyware, although this moring the zeros started appearing in the middle of text I was writing in a Dpreview thread seeking advice on the same topic.

Below is a description of what happenedwhichis an extract from my Dpreview thread.

"Someone is taking over my machine or at least trying to harvest information.

Last night while I was in Dpreview I hit a link to a subscribers pbase site which came up - but in the address bar was a series of non ending recurring "00000000" was showing. The same thing happened when I went to a second site. I then checked my mail and the same non ending recurring zeros were showing in the search panel of the email address pane and my email addresses had dissapeared. So I shut the iMac down.

This morning when I opened Mail the same zeros appeared and my addresses pane had disappeared so I shut Mail down. I checked Address book and the addresses were all there. I later rechecked Mail and the addresses were back again.

All seemed ok next when I started browsing (Safari) until I started writing the first message in this thread when zeros just started appearing in the middle of my text, so I shut the iMac down. I'm typing this on my Nortons AV protected pc which is not showing any problems."

Any suggestions/comments would be appreciated.

Also, I asked about the Intego software because that is what is for sale on the Australian Apple website.

Are you running a firewall? OS X? There's a basic one in the OS, but I installed SunShield Pro on my son's Macbook. If someone has taken over your machine, it can block such access, both inbound and outbound.

Might be worth trying to research this on some of the major vendor sites, in their research areas. I'll ask some of our researchers if they've ever heard of this.

Get the latest software updates, security updates, run repair permissions and other maintenance, and maybe that will help. I've seen a lot of problems like you describe and they have all been solved with proper maintenance and latest software - at least for me.

If you got something, it is the first I have ever heard of a mac virus/trojan/spyware out there.

Did you spill anything on the keyboard lately?

Click to expand...

Thanks for all your suggestions everyone - but Johnr gets the gong !

I spilt my drink on the keyboard a few days ago and thought I'd cleaned it all up properly - but obviouly not. I tested my keyboard using the keys that got dunked and the 00000's just kept coming. I'm typing this with Tracy's keyboard and all seems to be ok.

I've learnt a few things about my computer health in the last few days based on the suggestions here and in Dpreview. These are;
*people strongly believe there is no current virus threat to Macs
*don't be complacent and rely on Mac's anonymity regarding viruses. Its only a matter of time before they appear - especially now that intel macs can run windows and iphones & ipods interact with windows OS
*I'm turning on my firewall
*I've turned off my bluetooth and airport connections because I don't need them
*identifying a problm is made trickier if you latch onto the wrong probable cause (in this case my problems coincided with first forays into 2nd life and I felt we were very susceptable to attack)
*theres a heap of nice people out there in the forums all wiling to lend a hand (ok - I already knew this:smile

Thanks again evryone for your help - I appreciate it.

Now its off to the apple online store for a new keyboard (we might as well have a spare lying around the house)

Incidently, if anyone wonders if their Mac is being taken over[highly unlikely] there is a great piece of software called "little snitch" which will inform one who exactly your Mac is communicating with and will ask permission everytime it does so........ it is interesting for awhile anyway!!!!!!

Read this article before investing in Mac security software. It basically says that all software to date (as of mid 2006) created more problems than the security issues they were designed to mitigate, and to not bother with any of them.

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